Two of today's better known and more thoughtful Christian writers have abandoned their typical objective styles in order to divulge their innermost secrets and private struggles. Neither writer is gay, nor even an unrepentant shopaholic. Still, in recent books, Philip Yancey and Randall Balmer, both editors-at-large for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, confess that their lives -- and their faith in God -- are a whole lot healthier since they outgrew the arrogant and judgmental fundamentalism in which they were raised.

Two people were booked into the Orange County Jail on Wednesday, according to documents from the Orange County Sheriffs' Department. Matthew A. Griffin, 25, was being held for a misdemeanor charge of first-degree violation of probation. The documents do not indicate where or when the violation occurred. Xavier Aristides Rivera, 29, was booked on a misdemeanor charge from Orlando Police Department of second-degree carrying a firearm in a place where it is prohibited by law. The documents do not indicate where or when the incident occurred.

Two books about one of Daytona Beach's most sensational murder cases are hitting the bookstore shelves just in time to give the area a bad reputation for Christmas.Both deal with Kosta Fotopoulos, a Daytona Beach businessman who now resides on death row, and the 1989 plot to kill his wife, Lisa. And both portray Daytona Beach in almost as bad a light as they do Mr. Fotopoulos.Consider, for example, this excerpt from Sex, Money and Murder in Daytona Beach by Lee Butcher: ''Even the local people don't know the metamorphosis that occurs in Daytona Beach every twenty-four hours.

By David A. Collins and Amy Pavuk, Orlando Sentinel, September 19, 2011

Two men were arrested early Monday morning after a high-speed chase through two Central Florida counties ended at Rollins College. The chase began as a case of mistaken identity. Seminole County deputies initially responded to a call on Sipes Avenue near Sanford, where a woman told investigators her ex-boyfriend shot at her current boyfriend then took off in her car. Deputies began looking for her gold Nissan Maxima, and soon spotted a champagne-colored Maxima driven by Dwayne A. Mitchell, 33. Deputies tried to pull the car over, but Mitchell fled along State Road 417, said Seminole County sheriff's Lt. Barry Smith.

Juan Rulfo, 67, who was considered one of Mexico's foremost writers although he penned only two books, died Tuesday. A book of his short stories, The Plain in Flames, was published in 1953 and the novel Pedro Paramo in 1955.

Lake County School Board member Pat Hart, who objected to an elementary school buying two books featuring good witches and quacking fathers, will be asked to serve on a state council that helps select instructional materials.Selection council director Joe Taranto said Thursday that he intended to call Hart to ask if she wanted to be nominated for the school board post on one of several nine-member state councils. Other seats on each panel are held by four teachers, two school supervisors and non-educators.

Reading can be fun, entertaining and enlightening. A great work of literature - whether a novel or a short poem, serious or humorous - can help a student blossom into a critical thinker. But can certain books be a bad influence on children?That's what one Lake County parent believes about two books at her daughter's school: A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends, both by Shel Silverstein.Education experts have determined that those two books, which contain poems, are fun to read for children in the third grade on up. The silly, make-believe prose in the poems is very popular among children.

As travel writers go, William Trogdon carries a lot of baggage.Writing under the name William Least Heat-Moon, he set a high standard for himself with his first two books, Blue Highways and PrairyErth. He doesn't quite match that standard with the third book in the trilogy, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America.River-Horse isn't a bad book. On the contrary, it's a better-than-OK account of Heat-Moon's extraordinary four-month trip across the country almost entirely by boat - from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, from New York Harbor to the breakwater of Astoria, Ore.He made most of the trip in a motorboat he named Nikawa, which means ``river horse'' in Osage.

Two volumes in the family library sum up the difference between teenage siblings: A Day in the Life of a Midshipman and The Bad Girl's Guide to the Party Life. The first was a gift to my son, who has now departed for life as a midshipman. The second lies on the nightstand beside my daughter's bed, where she plots her escape from the vacuum of parental oversight left by her brother's departure. Together, the two books just about sum up my life as a parent. Sandra Travis-Bildahl wrote the first book in the voice of a midshipman who has dreamed of life at the Naval Academy since he was a 10-year-old boy smitten with the uniforms while touring the academy with his family.

Here are two books that celebrate the art of cocktails: - The Savoy Cocktail Book (Pavilion, $22.95) is a reprint with 750 cocktails from the famed London hotel's American Bar. Page after page ushers readers into an era when cocktails were king. The book was originally published in 1930, and the art and typography hark back to the Art Deco era. This isn't the exhaustive lineup you'll find in Mr. Boston but is nevertheless a fun read. The directions after the potent Thunderclap Cocktail for six - a blend of brandy, gin and whiskey - reads, ``Serve to the six people.

John Rogers read to his daughter Ashlie's kindergarten class this week at Grassy Lake Elementary in Clermont as part of the school's Read Across America celebration. Rogers was one of several guest readers at the event that emphasizes the importance of reading as well as the birthday of children's author Dr. Seuss. Theodor 'Ted' Seuss Geisel was born March 2, 1904, and died Sept. 24, 1991. The National Education Association's Read Across America initiative is an annual reading-motivation and awareness program that calls for children in every community to celebrate reading on Geisel's birthday.

What happens when you discover, via a genetic test, that you are at very high risk for a potentially fatal disease? Two memoirs aim to find out: Masha Gessen's Blood Matters and Jessica Queller's Pretty Is What Changes. One of them makes the reader acutely aware of the issues a woman facing an 85 percent chance of breast cancer must weigh. The other is an account of famous people the author knows, occasionally interspersed with oncologists. Blood Matters opens as the writer grapples with a decision: Should she remove her breasts and ovaries to prevent cancer?

*How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free: Retirement wisdom that you won't get from your financial advisor by Ernie J. Zelinski (Ten Speed Press). Zelinksi does not believe the most fulfilling times of a person's life are passed in jobs that are dull, repetitive and far from stimulating. He praises the alternative: What these workers could create for themselves if only they weren't chained to a traditional job. (He bases this attitude on his personal experience: semi-retiring at age 30 with a net worth of less than $30,000.

British military operations against American colonists began badly at Lexington and Concord in 1775, and ended just as badly at New Orleans in 1815. Two British military historians have now explored those two conflicts, the American Revolution and the War of 1812, from their side's perspective. While Jon Latimer in 1812 gives full credit to American accomplishments -- especially for the naval victories on the Great Lakes and by the Constitution and other frigates at sea -- he argues that the war "must be seen as a British victory, however marginal."

That famous F. Scott Fitzgerald line from The Last Tycoon is the perfect inspiration for critic, screenwriter and teacher David Thomson's "life's work" summation of everything he has learned about film in his 60-some-odd years. "Not a half-a-dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads." Thomson's The Whole Equation is a personal history of Hollywood and a meditative take on what the movies mean, and what our centurylong fascination with them has done to us. Thomson -- who wrote the script to a widely viewed documentary on the making of Gone With the Wind, as well as books on David O. Selznick and Orson Welles -- has a funny, flippant style that makes his history of the movies immensely readable.

Two volumes in the family library sum up the difference between teenage siblings: A Day in the Life of a Midshipman and The Bad Girl's Guide to the Party Life. The first was a gift to my son, who has now departed for life as a midshipman. The second lies on the nightstand beside my daughter's bed, where she plots her escape from the vacuum of parental oversight left by her brother's departure. Together, the two books just about sum up my life as a parent. Sandra Travis-Bildahl wrote the first book in the voice of a midshipman who has dreamed of life at the Naval Academy since he was a 10-year-old boy smitten with the uniforms while touring the academy with his family.

BEFORE WILLIAM Raspberry locks Glenn Loury, Tony Brown and Ed Norton ''in a room until they came up with an approach to racial justice they all agree on,'' he should first send each of them a copy of two of Thomas Sowell's books: Preferential Policies: An International Perspective and Inside American Education. In both books Sowell looks hard and intelligently at the dismal results of preferential policies worldwide and in the United States educational system. Both books are based on careful research.

A decade after forming a pen-pal club for children from the United States and the former Soviet Union, Katherine Corbett has released two books inspired by those Cold War epistles. "I wanted to help Russian and American children get to know each other," said Corbett, a copy editor at Harcourt Inc., an Orlando publishing firm. "And I decided to write a book." The book became books, and now Corbett is planning a "young adult reading" series. She recently read passages from her first two books at Borders Books at Ocoee's West Oaks Mall, drawing a few dozen of her readers and friends.

Even if you live in a house so huge you can skate to the front door, it's worthwhile to think about living small. As Terence Conran points out in his latest book, Small Spaces (Clarkson Potter, $40), tiny rooms are the ultimate decorating laboratory. At their best, he says, they "represent not so much a way of surviving on the bare minimum, but a refinement, a distillation of what really matters and what really works." That means they force you to decide which possessions you really want to live with and what things you really like to do. Like a rigorous personal trainer, they transform you into a clean, lean living machine.

Two of today's better known and more thoughtful Christian writers have abandoned their typical objective styles in order to divulge their innermost secrets and private struggles. Neither writer is gay, nor even an unrepentant shopaholic. Still, in recent books, Philip Yancey and Randall Balmer, both editors-at-large for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, confess that their lives -- and their faith in God -- are a whole lot healthier since they outgrew the arrogant and judgmental fundamentalism in which they were raised.